NEW DELHI: Tata Teleservices Limited (TTSL) on Friday entered into a strategic partnership with retail major Future Group to offer mobile telephony services on the GSM platform.

Starting with the telecom circles in South India, TTSL will soon commence mobile operations under the brand name T24 and cover entire nation by the end of this year. “This is a unique marketing alliance between a retailer and a telecom operator in India. Under the franchise model, the service will only be available to Future Group customers. Future Group will sell TTSL GSM connections under the brand name T24 to customers in its retail outlets,” TTSL Managing Director Anil Sardana told journalists here.

According to Future Group CEO Kishore Biyani: “Customers will get shopping benefits for talking and talk-time benefits each time they shop.” Though details of the tariff plan are yet to be worked out, T24 subscribers would be offered innovative schemes and first-of-its-kind value propositions like a talk-time offering, cross-bundled with other consumption categories, he added.